Silk Scarves
by Assimbya
Summary: Merope Gaunt muses on her time with Tom Riddle as she struggles to survive alone.


It wasn't the poverty that bothered her, not really. She had lived with poverty all her life, and even if she was unused to sleeping in alleyways without any cover from the rain or snow, it was better to not have the kicks and harsh words that had come constantly from her father and brother when she lived with them.

No, it was not the poverty that bothered her. It was the absence of Tom's arms around her at night, the moments when she almost forgot the sound of his laughter. She was determined to keep in her memory every detail about him, even though she knew that she would never see him again, and those little details made her cry silently at night, because she knew that those months were the best in her life, and would always be.

And perhaps she could tell her child about these details about their father someday. Though sometimes it was hard to think that far ahead.

So she preserved those details, almost as if they were scraps of silk that she folded up and put away in a trunk somewhere, and then sometimes she would take the trunk out and unfold the scraps, running her fingers over them and memorizing the texture.

Silk was always something she would associate with Tom. Before she knew him she had never touched it before, only seen it sometimes, from far away, worn by Tom's female companions as they passed the hut, filling the air with their girlish laughter. One of the first things he bought her was a silk scarf, a dark blue one the color of the sky on a winter evening. She had looked at it in open wonder as she felt how smooth and light it was between her fingers. He had laughed at her amazement and kissed her. "My dear, innocent Merope." He had said as he laughed, and she loved the sound of his voice, the way he said her name so differently from the way everyone all her life had. When he said her name it made her sound as if she was a precious treasure, something as beautiful and fragile as the silk scarf, but also valued just as such a scarf was.

She didn't have the scarf anymore. When he had thrown her out of the house, his handsome face contorted with rage, it had been torn away from her by the wind, and she had watched lifted into the air for a moment before falling to the ground again at Tom's feet.

"_Disgusting witch! You put a spell on me so that you could get my money, didn't you? Well, you can go back to that hellhole you call a house and bring your devil's spawn of a child with you!"_

He had stepped on the scarf, and she saw it crushed into the mud beneath the heel of his boot. She could see the fragile fabric tear and she knew that the scarf is ruined now, so easily. Such a fragile thing, this symbol he gave her of his love.

Of course he had given her a ring too, but she had sold that very soon after he had thrown her out. He had told her that she wasn't his wife anymore, hadn't he, and that meant she shouldn't have the ring anymore, didn't it? Of course she had never been his wife by law, but she had been in every way that mattered. But there was no use in reflecting on whether or not she had truly been his wife, and she sold the ring the first chance she got. She had snapped her wand too, without much regret. She couldn't help thinking that it was that which had caused her to lose Tom, that length of smooth wood.

All she had left was the locket, cold and heavy against her neck. Whenever she touched it the memory of her father and brother returned, her father's constant repetition of her heritage, of what the locket meant. She didn't know why she hadn't sold that too. Maybe it was the constant echo in her mind, the endless refrain that always ended with the name Slytherin. Somewhere in her mind she was afraid that something awful would happen if she got rid of it.

But eventually she did, after several months. Several months of cold and hunger and the complaints of pregnancy, spending the nights huddled in an alleyway with no one to talk to but her unborn child.

So she sold the locket. She had known that it was worth far more than the amount the man there gave her, but the money would buy her food for quite some time, as well as a new cloak, for the nights were cold and sometimes she felt as though the child she bore was stealing the warmth from her very bones. She didn't care about anything but the immediate future, not then, and didn't care to ask for more money. Sometimes there were distant thoughts of _when the child is born…_but those were quickly ended, for she could barely contemplate that time.

She became a familiar sight to any who came to that part of London, shivering despite the new cloak as December came and snow began to fall. It was always cold in the winter at the Gaunt home – her father had yelled at her to start a fire, and her tongue had always fumbled over the word _Incendio_ – but with Tom she had never thought that she would be cold, not with his arms around her as they always were at night, for he liked to be as close to her as possible. And he had told her how beautiful she looked, whispering into her hair, which had made her feel warmer than any fire could.

To take her mind off of Tom, she would talk to her unborn child. Most of the time she would speak in parseltongue, She would tell every secret she ever had, knowing that they wouldn't be remembered, that they weren't even being heard, but she needed to somehow.

Perhaps she knew somewhere in her subconscious that she wouldn't be there to tell them to the child later, and so they all needed to come out then, all the little details, the little memories like scraps of silk. But though it seemed that by saying them then she was preserving them, it turned out to be more as though she cast them all to the wind, one by one, hoping that they would never come back down to earth.


End file.
